It's been 50 years since the start of construction on the Berlin Wall. TIME looks back at 10 movies that were set in the time of the Wall—and now have outlasted it.
John F. Kennedy may have loved Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, but the true literary spymaster of the ’60s was John Le Carré. Under his real name, David Cornwell, he worked for MI6, the British foreign intelligence service, in Berlin and then Hamburg, where he wrote The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. Its publication in 1963 alerted readers to the morally gray nature of espionage and the very un-Bondian nature of its players. “They’re just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me,” says Le Carré’s MI6 protagonist Alec Leamas (Richard Burton) in the movie version. “Little men, drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives.” Fiedler (Oskar Werner), the East German agent who interrogates Leamas when he pretends to defect to communism, has an even worse opinion: “You are a traitor… the lowest currency of the Cold War. We buy you, we sell you, we lose you. We even can shoot you! Not a bird would stir in the trees outside.”
The bracingly bleak film version — easily the most famous Berlin Wall movie — was scripted by Paul Dehn (who had co-written the Bond film Goldfinger) and directed by the American Martin Ritt, taking a break from his ’60s run of five Paul Newman movies (including Hud and Hombre). Burt Lancaster was originally cast as Leamas until sanity intervened, and the newly-hot Mr. Elizabeth Taylor got the part. Burton’s black-Welsh eloquence proved an ideal match, and Ritt pulled similarly impressive-depressive performances from Werner and Claire Bloom, who plays Nan, an English librarian of communist ideals who is drawn into the deadly game.
Like the novel, the movie (shot in England and Ireland) starts and ends at the Berlin Wall. At the beginning, Leamas watches as his prize double-agent is shot as he tries to cross, thus forcing the English agent into his own double duty “in the cold.” Discovering a residue of ethics through his love for Nan, Leamas decides that capitalism and communism are equally bankrupt and returns with her to the Wall — still a spy, but no 007, and still a man who would risk his life to be with his woman.
While Hollywood scampered to make spy movies even more frivolous than the mega-popular Bond films and produced short-lived secret-agent franchises for Dean Martin (as Matt Helm) and James Coburn (as Derek Flint), the Brits hewed to the dour tradition established by The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. In the 1966 The Quiller Memorandum, directed by Michael Anderson from the novel by Adam Hall, an MI6 operative (inappropriately impersonated by the American smirker George Segal) skulks through Cold War Berlin tracking a ring of neo-Nazis run by Max von Sydow. Senta Berger was the romantic interest who may be playing both sides. In the script by Nobel Prize-winning cynic Harold Pinter, the proceedings are monitored back in London by two senior spies of the upper-class-twit species (George Sanders and Robert Flemyng), who exchange bland pleasantries about international murder while taking lunch at their club.
Britain’s premier semirealistic spy was Harry Palmer — an ex-thief with a independent spirit who had been dragooned into the secret service — in the three-film series from Len Deighton novels that began with The Ipcress File. Between Ipcress and Funeral in Berlin, Michael Caine had blossomed into an international star as the blithe womanizer in Alfie. He brought that luster to Palmer’s second case: a trip to East Berlin to vet the defection of General Stock (Oskar Homolka), a Soviet intelligence officer. Palmer’s terse wit may simply be truth (his reason for spying: “I get paid”), but he knows the fine points of negotiating with a blustering Russian. Stok: “For you it is a propaganda victory. My name is worth a headline.” Harry: “We get plenty of Russians. A pity you’re not Chinese.”
Directed by Guy Hamilton (Goldfinger) and scripted by Evan Jones (the spy spoof Modesty Blaise), the movie triggered its own Cold War incident on location in West Berlin. As the crew shot near Checkpoint Charlie, Russian soldiers on the other side of the Wall tried to ruin the scene by reflecting sunlight into the cameras.
